10 Cultural Resolutions for 2010: Cast A Spell

Now that wizards and vampires have become box-office magic, Hollywood hopes to bewitch audiences with a year of star-studded supernatural fantasies. Tim Burton’s visually extravagant Alice in Wonderland stars Mia Wasikowska as the young lady who tumbles down the rabbit hole, follows the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), and must deal with the Red and White Queens, played by Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway. Alice’s travails look mild compared to those confronting Perseus (Sam Worthington) in Clash of the Titans, who, in order to rescue Princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos), must battle Medusa, assorted creepy-crawly monsters, and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, King of the Underworld. While Perseus’s tale comes from classic Greek mythology, movie fantasies seldom demand such a respectable provenance. Indeed, M. Night’s Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is based on a goofy TV series—its hero must fight against the Fire nation’s attempt to enslave the Water, Earth and Air nations—and Mike Newell’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time takes its story from a video game. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Prince Dastan, who must team up with a rival princess (Gemma Arterton) to keep an evil vizier (Ben Kingsley, a long way from Gandhi) from destroying the world. The mayhem turns modern in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a live-action riff on the story we all know from Fantasia but that was actually dreamed up by Goethe. Nic Cage plays a New York sorcerer who leaves his atelier in the hands of his fumbling assistant (Jay Baruchel). I don’t know if the movie will be scary, but I’m already terrified by Cage’s hairdo. By comparison, Your Highness sounds positively sunny. Set when people were sensible—you know, back in the Middle Ages—David Gordon Green’s comedy follows two princes, one heroic (James Franco) and one lazy (Danny McBride), who must thwart an evil wizard by rescuing a kidnapped princess (Zooey Deschanel) with the aid of an enigmatic woman warrior (Natalie Portman). The hero’s helpers are four-legged in The Zookeeper, where a group of caged animals (voiced by the likes of Cher, Adam Sandler, and Sylvester Stallone) start talking in order to assist zookeeper Kevin James’s pursuit of Rosario Dawson. Of course, even if nobody goes for any of these fantasies, one thing is sure. Everyone will line up to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I, in which the world’s most popular wizard begins his climactic showdown with Lord Voldemort (Fiennes is clearly cornering the Embodiment of Evil market). And they’ll be lining up at midnight to see The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, which promises to answer a question of cosmic import: Will Bella choose hunky werewolf Jacob over fang-tastic Edward? (Hint: No.) If you want to dream up a really wild fantasy, just try imagining that these two movies won’t be two of the biggest hits of 2010.